


Talking With Monsters

by Callisto



Series: Season 5 codas [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode Related, Episode: s05e08 Changing Channels, Gen, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-09
Updated: 2011-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-17 19:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callisto/pseuds/Callisto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He glances across at his brother, broad shouldered and huge in shotgun, and Dean wonders when he got used to Sam filling the car with muscles and silence. A sudden pang for the boy who once superglued Dean’s hand to a beer bottle and enjoyed the joke for an entire day makes him tighten his hands on the steering wheel.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Talking With Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> The Trickster was too good an opportunity to let go by, and I used this coda to go back and deal with some 'Mystery Spot' issues that I think we were all hoping Show would.
> 
> To this end, I have cribbed and tweaked a speech of Sam's from my own Mystery Spot fic, 'Staring In'.
> 
>  _Dean: “Oh, by the way? Talking with monsters? Helluva plan.”  
>  Sam: “Just...what do we do now?”  
> Dean: “You know what I’m doing? Leaving.”  
> \--5.08 Changing Channels--_
> 
> Thanks to my beta Ancasta.

It starts raining hard after they’ve been on the road for about ten minutes and Dean is grateful for something mundane to think about. The wiper on the driver’s side sticks, so he has to concentrate on the road ahead and slow down. He suggests stopping to eat and waiting it out somewhere. Sam nods and shrugs, and Dean goes back to getting them through the downpour. The rain is hypnotic--and not in a good way--so he finds himself blinking to focus. He glances across at his brother, broad shouldered and huge in shotgun, and Dean wonders when he got used to Sam filling the car with muscles and silence. A sudden pang for the boy who once superglued Dean’s hand to a beer bottle and enjoyed the joke for an entire day makes him tighten his hands on the steering wheel.

“What do you think we should do, Sam?”

It’s the second time he’s asked this, and he doesn’t mean for it to come out as harshly as it does. It’s not Sam’s fault that boy is gone forever and that they’ve just come out of a dysfunctional dipshit’s idiot box. It really isn’t and he’s had about enough of the heavenly host, Sam, and every demon and angel they come across saying that it is. He genuinely needs to know what to do next. There’s a ball of low-lying panic in his belly he doesn’t want to own up to, and there is, quite simply, no one else to ask. Outside the warehouse, Cas had glared at Sam, told Dean to stay alive, and then winked out on both of them.

“I don’t know, Dean. Keep doing what we’ve been doing, I guess.”

“You don’t think that maybe we should lay low, stay out of sight for a while?”

“Where? I don’t think they need maps to find their vessels. Lucifer appeared next to me in my bed behind a locked motel door.”

“Whoa... dude!”

“As _Jessica_ , dumbass.”

Dean quiets instantly. “Really?”

Sam shifts. “Yeah,” he says, even quieter.

“Was it... I mean, did you...?”

“No! Shut up. God, Dean.” But Sam’s exasperation at his gross big brother is doing the trick, making those big shoulders relax a little.

Dean has to voice an idea that’s probably going to tense them right back up, though.

“Maybe we should head to Bobby’s for a while.”

“Why? I thought we were grabbing onto whatever was in front of us and kicking its ass?”

“We were. We _are_. But...”

“But what, Dean?”

Sam is turning in the seat toward him, the beginnings of a pissy edge to his voice. Jesus H...

“But nothing, Sam! You fucking heard him, ‘one brother must kill the other’. So far we’re one step ahead of the game, but I don’t know, I’ve been hearing that way too often recently.”

“So what? Hiding out at Bobby’s is somehow magically going to make everybody leave us alone? Or do you...? Wait, you’re not... you’re not thinking of maybe trying to leave _me_ there while you take off on some kind of half-assed crusade?

“No!” He had actually, a fleeting thought when the Trickster – he really can’t call him anything angelic just yet – was doing the whole “as it must be on earth” thing. But any panic he feels at their hands being forced against each other is offset the second he remembers Sam in white, remembers the quiet snap of his own neck breaking.

“No,” he repeats. “I’m just...” Shit, he’s going to have to say it. He hunches over the wheel and glares out the windshield. “I’m scared, Sam. Okay? There, I fucking said it.” He exhales, runs a hand through his hair and knows it’s now or never. He’ll get all this crap out at once and then they need never talk about it again. “It’s all a little much sometimes, you know?” He glances sideways. “It’s like one misstep... _one_...by me, and the whole deck of cards... and by deck of cards, I mean you, me, and all the life out there,” he takes one hand off the wheel to gesture vaguely at the wet world beyond, “will fall. It will _fall_ , Sam.” He hears Sam fill his chest with air to interrupt and hurries on. “I’m not saying we’re not in this together. We are. I know we are, but as much as we’re a team I’m the older brother. Always have been, always will be. So if I feel more responsible for everything we do, well... fucking tough, you have to suck it up and deal, because that’s just the way it is, the way I’m made.”

“Sucks to be you, huh?”

Dean looks at him, surprised, but Sam isn’t mocking him. It’s a shy, almost gentle smile on the face looking back at Dean, the kind of smile Dean hasn’t seen for an awfully long time. Dean swallows and looks back out the windshield. “Dude, you have no idea.”

They drive on in silence for a few minutes, and just as Dean is feeling like a monumental asshole for confessing his all when Sam-- _emofuckingsharewithmeSam_ \--is clearly not even interested, Sam finally breaks the quiet.

“You remember Max?”

Not what Dean was expecting at all. He blinks. “That psychic kid? Yeah, I remember him, why?”

Sam is studying his hands, which are palm down, flat and wide on his jeans. “Do you remember what you said to me afterwards?”

Dean shakes his head, intrigued.

“I was freaking out because I moved that dresser with my mind when I thought you were going to die, and you... you told me that nothing bad would ever happen to me while you were around.” Sam looks up at him, breathing a little heavily, but keeping his voice steady. “And you were right Dean. You were always right about that.”

“Not always. You died, Sam.”

“Yeah, and you brought me back.”

Said quietly and with so much faith and regret mixed in that Dean has to say something.

“No biggie, Sam. Not anymore. I guess Hell fucked us both up, huh?”

“I’m not talking about Hell, Dean.”

“Then what?”

Another silence, and Sam is chewing his lip and driving Dean crazy with this shit—

“That was actually the second time you died on me, Dean. Your first death lasted six months, not four. You left me alone after you got shot in a fucking parking lot. I held you, you bled out, and I squeezed my eyes shut and couldn’t wake up. Six months, Dean. And do you know what I did at the end of it? I staked Bobby. _Bobby_. I mean, I was pretty sure he was the Trickster at the time. And lucky for Bobby he was, because I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, and I staked him anyway.”

And now Dean has to pull over, because Sam got all of that out of his system way too fast, and the thrum of blood in his ears is making Dean suddenly lightheaded. No signal, no finesse, no checking for cars, just a scrabble on the wheel before it all slips from his grasp and he wakes up or falls down the rabbit hole.

He switches the engine off and turns in the seat toward his brother. He opens his mouth, sure he heard wrong and that any second now he’s going to be justified in smacking Sam across the head for yanking his chain about something so unspeakable. He closes his mouth, pulse no quieter for the muscle flexing in Sam’s jaw.

He licks his lips, tries again.

“You wanna run that by me one more time, chief? Because I think I might remember going six feet under more than once.”

Sam looks at him, jaw set. “Broward County. Before the Wednesday you remember there was another one. One I never told you about. On that Wednesday you died in the parking lot and you stayed dead, Dean. For six months.”

Dean’s first thought is to deny it, dismiss it as a new kind of crazy Sam has thought up to torture him. He has no memory of this at all. Nothing. But one look at the way Sam’s hands are balling up into fists tells him it’s real, and the gorge rises in his throat as he stares while Sam talks.

“You know me and revenge, Dean.” Sam laughs, short and bitter. “All I did was track that demented sonovabitch. For six months I tacked up intel on the walls and pored over it every night until my eyes bled. I kept every weapon spotless, ate when I fainted, slept like a goddamn soldier, and used a mirror and a bottle of Jack to take out and stitch up anything that cut me along the way.”

Dean wants Sam to stop. He really needs for Sam to stop talking now. It took him a long time, a lot of disgust, and his own fair share of Jack to see past the betrayal and the hurt to the whys and how-the-fucks of Ruby, and here is Sam, giving him yet another piece to slot into that horrible puzzle. The Trickster as nothing but a dry run for Lilith, with Dean and his death at the core both times.

“How come you never told me?” is the only thing he can think to ask, a little helpless to know what else to say.

Sam smiles, watery and so Sam-like, Dean doesn’t know whether to punch him or kiss him.

“I got you back. For however long, I got you back and it didn’t matter. The clock was ticking so fast after that, and I just...” Sam sighs and looks out the passenger side window. “I couldn’t let myself think about failing you and being on my own again.”

Dean nods. He gets it. He remembers how Sam was back then. All reined in fury and determination, as if his will alone could keep Dean safe. Of course, it couldn’t. Dean died, broke that will, and Ruby and her blood stepped right up and dangled Lilith like an answer to every prayer for forgiveness his brother ever had.

“Why are you telling me this now, Sam?”

The rain is easing off and Dean has almost forgotten what prompted this in the first place.

Sam talks to his hands in his lap when he answers.

“I don’t do well when you’re not around. Not since Jess. I’m twenty-seven, and I know how pathetic it sounds that I need my big brother to make my life work, and maybe it won’t always be like this. But for right now, you’re also going to have to suck it up and deal, because that’s just the way _I_ am, the way I’m made.”

Low blow throwing Dean’s own words right back at him, but two can play at that game.

“Sucks to be you, huh?”

Sam looks at him, serious and wide-eyed like only Sam can be.

“Not really. Not anymore.”

And that right there, is worth all the emo in the world.

So Dean does the only thing he can, save break down and bawl - and they have just had too much of a weird fucking day already for that. He elbows Sam in the ribs, slaps his knee.

“’Course it doesn’t suck. How can it, dude? I’m here and I’m awesome, and I’m not going anywhere without your lame ass around to make mine look good.”

Sam rolls his eyes, backhands Dean’s shoulder, and when Dean mock-glares at him Sam sticks his tongue out. He honest to God _sticks his tongue out_. Never mind the sun finally making an appearance from behind the clouds, this alone is enough to make Dean see the glass half full again.

Maybe, just maybe, they’re going to get through this.

******


End file.
